The challenge

Cottage Health wanted to reimagine women’s health as one experience across every life stage. Its existing programs were strong, but each lived in its own department. Patients repeated their histories, interpreted new symptoms alone, and coordinated moves among fertility, pelvic health, oncology, screening, and longevity. Research showed that nurse navigators already provided continuity in parts of the system, giving the future service a model to build from.

My contribution

I owned the portfolio strategy and turned that finding into a vision Cottage Health could assign, fund, and pilot.

• Directed ethnographic research with women across life stages and shadowed care in clinics, screening programs, and a nurse navigator’s tumor board. The work traced where context disappeared and where trusted staff restored it.
• Built a custom GPT over the research corpus to help the team test patterns against the full body of interviews, diary entries, and field notes during synthesis.
• Moved the team quickly from findings to rough concepts, then put those concepts in front of patients, clinicians, and operations staff while they were still easy to change.
• Defined three connected services: True North for life-stage navigation, Care Circle for ongoing human support, and Wellness Commons for education and community between appointments.
• Built Cottage Garden as the vision’s working artifact, combining the service concepts, experience maps, and implementation choices in a format Cottage Health’s leaders could use without a presentation team.
• Converted the vision into pilot briefs with owners, success measures, staffing needs, and technical dependencies.

The impact

The service vision gives women a navigator and support team across specialties. A new symptom can be understood alongside prior care, while education and community support remain available between appointments.

Cottage Health’s women’s health leader used Cottage Garden to present the vision to the board, which approved next steps. Care Circle is now being piloted as a coordinated support model, while True North resources are being piloted as a first step toward life-stage navigation. In 2026 Cottage Health launched its Center for Women’s Health, led by Medical Director Dr. Jane Varner, which brings primary and specialty care, diagnostics, and support services into one coordinated entry point for women and has since added a Breast Health Clinic. Together, the services are laying the foundation for a planned Women’s Health Pavilion.